“Vintage Cinema” – Classic film score themes from 1933-1962 – King Kong, Robin Hood, Spellbound, The Red Pony, Sunset Blvd., A Streetcar Named Desire, A Place in the Sun, On the Waterfront, North By Northwest, To Kill a Mockingbird, Taras Bulba, El Cid – Cincinnati Pops Orchestra/Erich Kunzel – Telarc Multichannel SACD-60708, 53:13 ***** [Release date: Oct. 28, 08]:
Would you believe this is the 87th Telarc recording by Kunzel and his Pops? We liked their previous effort – Bolero – reviewed here. It seems some of these themes were already covered by Kunzel and his crew in their previous CDs, but perhaps different sections have been chosen here, and the idea of chronological arrangement of the dozens tracks is a welcome new twist. The program opens with one of the first blockbuster film scores (though many years passed before complete soundtrack recordings were released). Max Steiner’s dramatic score aided the story of the big gorilla King Kong immensely. The second track brings us the composer who made his Germanic Late-Romantic lush orchestral style the accepted standard for Hollywood film scores for decades: Eric Wolfgang Korngold. The excerpt is from his 1938 music for a Robin Hood which starred Errol Flynn, but it produced in my mind an image of Douglas Fairbanks since I had recently seen Kevin Kline’s portrayal of him in Chaplin.
Alex North’s music for A Streetcar Named Desire was the first big Hollywood production to make use of jazz on the soundtrack, and was followed by several others. This was perhaps the first major departure from the Korngold classical orchestral approach. The music from Leonard Bernstein’s score to On the Waterfront is another use of the jazz influence. Miklos Rozsa brought an exotic twist from his Hungarian background to his scores for several historical features, including El Cid heard here. He and Franz Waxman are the only two composers represented by two selections on the disc. A seven-minute suite assembled from Rozsa’s Spellbound score is heard, which was one of the first soundtracks to use the theremin.
Each of the film themes has a helpful descriptive paragraph in the note booklet. Kunzel’s players are well used to this type of material and play it with great gusto – not just reading off the notes as on some of the orchestral recreations of soundtrack music. Telarc pulls out all the stops in achieving an enveloping and exciting hi-res surround effect in the music – it’s just like being at the movies!
TrackList:
1. Main Title and Entrance of Kong from King Kong
2. Robin Hood and His Merry Men from the Adventures of Robin Hood
3. Suite from Spellbound
4. Selections from The Red Pony
5. Suite from Sunset Boulevard
6. Suite from A Streetcar Named Desire
7. Suite from A Place in the Sun
8. Selections from On the Waterfront
9. Overture from North by Northwest
10. Overture from El Cid
11. Main Title from To Kill A Mockingbird
12. The Ride of the Cossacks from Taras Bulba
– John Sunier
